Hound of Hounslow: Who is Navinder Sarao, the ‘flash crash trader’?
Andy Verity & Eleanor Lawrie, 28 January 2020
Former stock market trader Navinder Sarao has been sentenced to a year of home detention for helping trigger a brief $1tn (£770bn) stock market crash.
Dubbed the “Hound of Hounslow” in an ironic reference to the famous “Wolf of Wall Street” fraudster, the Briton was shown leniency by a Chicago judge due to the extraordinary circumstances of his case.
But who is he – and how did he help cause markets to plunge almost 4,000 miles away?
Who is Navinder Sarao?
Now 42, Navinder Sarao is a self-taught stock market trader who helped cause panic in US markets in 2010 from a bedroom in his parents’ home in Hounslow, West London.
He was arrested in 2015 for his part in the “flash crash”- in which financial markets briefly plummeted in value. In this case it lasted less than an hour, wiping almost $1tn off shares before markets recovered.
Sarao then spent four months in Wandsworth prison before being extradited to the US. Unusually, he was allowed to return to the UK before sentencing, where he has been helping authorities catch other market fraudsters.
